As much as I write about education, every once in a while I’m stunned by some nugget of information.

I’ve been walking around with data from the Boulder Valley School District on its achievement gap. The district gave me the info last week for Saturday’s column about a Colorado Statewide Parent Coalition program in Boulder County seeking to correct the achievement gap among low-income Latino kids. District employees are well aware of the magnitude of the problem, worried about it, and have been trying, without much success, to close the gap.

But the numbers . . .

Reading: 70 percent of American Indian, 86 percent of Asian-American, 68 percent of African-American and 88 percent of white students scored partially proficient or better on the state standardized test. Latinos? 42 percent.

I know. It’s a lot of numbers. And more follow. But read them. Carefully.

Disaster is unfolding.

I planned to change the subject today, but on Friday, I saw former Denver Mayor Federico Peña speak about the achievement gap, and on Monday, I spoke to Metropolitan State College president Steve Jordan. So you could say I’m freshly evangelized.

“This needs to be the No. 1 topic of conversation in Denver, in Colorado,” Peña said. “This crisis is occurring now, and it’s going to get worse. . . . We have to realize that how we deal with our public schoolchildren, particularly Latino schoolchildren, is a national priority.”

About one-third of this city is Latino. Latinos make up 22 percent of all youth under 18 in the country, up from 9 percent in 1980. According to the Pew Hispanic Center, in 2007, 63 percent of Latino children were either foreign-born or born in the U.S. but had at least one foreign-born parent. This generally means they are less likely to speak fluent English or to have parents who finished high school. They are more likely — huge red flag here — to live in poverty.

By 2025, about one in every three young people in the U.S. will be Latino. By midcentury, half of the country will be ethnic and racial minorities.

Now, read those Boulder Valley School District data again.

The good news is that many people have connected the dots. The bad news is not enough have.

People want to talk about illegal immigration or bad parents or lazy students or myopic unions or out-of- touch administrators. Yes, these play some role in the achievement gap, and each should be addressed. Instead, what happens is that each becomes a distraction, a political catfight, and we (again) lose sight of the big picture. Some simply say: They are not our children, and this is not our problem.

But they are, and it is.

Peña says closing the gap is crucial if we intend to compete internationally. Laurie Hirschfeld Zeller, president of A-plus Denver, a civic group dedicated to improving Denver’s public schools, says it is also “about citizenship. It’s about making sure kids in Denver lead productive lives.”

As for Metro president Jordan, he drew a basic line chart for me. The horizontal axis was educational attainment; the vertical was personal income. Colorado long has enjoyed its status as one of the high-educational attainment, high-income states. This is, in part, because we import highly educated, highly skilled workers — the so-called Colorado Paradox.

But break down Colorado’s data by county, Jordan says, and only a handful of its counties occupy that high corner. Nearly all of the rest cluster in the low-income, low-educational- attainment corner of the grid.

Between now and 2020, Jordan says, much of the minority population growth in this state will occur in the handful of those high-corner counties. Add to that, he says, data showing Colorado has the largest gap in the nation between whites and its next-largest ethnic/racial group (Latinos) among those with an associate’s degree or higher. The bottom line is that Colorado’s population is changing, and that change is coming from precisely the same group that is falling furthest behind in school.

“The public has never understood the ‘so what?’ part of the achievement gap,” Jordan says, because the Paradox has shielded the state from its ramifications. “We need to be discussing this now if we want to preserve the economic health and lifestyle of this state.”

Either that, Jordan says, or we gamble that the Colorado of the future will be able to import all the highly educated workers it needs and still offset the lost productivity and increased social costs of its native population.

Do you want to take that risk?

Neither do I.

Tina Griego writes Tuesdays, Thursdays and Saturdays. Reach her at 303-954-2699 or tgriego@denverpost.com.

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